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The X-Files: 20 Years Later

Holy crap. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since “The X-Files” pilot episode aired. I watched the first episode when it premiered. I was 10 years old. And after that first episode, I subsequently taped every single episode, bought magazines, books, soundtracks…and can thank David Duchovny for pushing me right into puberty (even after all his, er, follies, I still have a really really creepy totally normal – I swear – crush on him). Don’t believe me? Ask my friends. Actually, don’t, they know far too much.

But I digress. 20 years, y’all! wow!

It’s been 20 years since “The X-Files” opened to viewers’ wanting-to-believe eyes, and the hit paranormal investigation drama’s creator, Chris Carter, doesn’t quite know what to make of that phenomenon.

“Scully, would you think less of me as a man if I told you I was kind of excited right now?”

“It’s surreal,” he told a sold-out crowd Sunday at the Hero Complex Film Festival shortly after entering to a standing ovation. “It’s like an X-File…. Twenty years’ missing time.”

Asked what he might do differently if he made the show now, he said, “It was of its time…. You probably could make the show today, but, I don’t know why, it just feels like it was made exactly when it should have been made.”

The festival’s closing night was devoted to the acclaimed Fox series, and included screenings of three fan-picked episodes – the pilot, which he wrote, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” and “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.”

Carter said the pilot scene in which FBI special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a skeptical scientist, first meets her new partner, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), a crusading believer in aliens and conspiracy, wasn’t just their introduction as a duo to the audience, but to him as well: “That’s the first time they really acted together. They didn’t audition together for the parts. We really cast them separately, so we didn’t know there’d be that chemistry. What you were watching was really a kind of test, and it ended up working.”